On the occasion of Women’s Day, MSME and consumer lending frontrunner, Protium, has launched 6 new policies to support and promote the wellness of its current and future female employees. The policies cover special incentives regarding conversion on referrals for female talent, employee safety, flexi-hours, back to work, menstrual leave and adoption leave.
Though such policies are highly debated online and are also the subject of controversy, Protium is adopting a Menstrual Leave policy that will grant female employees up to 2 leaves per month should the employee need to take them. Protium is also adopting an Adoption Leave policy, where the organization has promised to grant 3 months of paid leave to employees that are currently in the process of adopting a child.
Under the Referral policy, the referrer will be granted 1.5X of the usual referral bonus if the hired candidate is female. The architects of the new referral policy felt that, rather than introducing an initiative to simply refer more women indiscriminately, a policy such as this would encourage employees to refer more deserving female candidates.
As part of the company’s Safety for All policy, an SOS feature, that allows employees to get in touch with emergency contacts as well as emergency services, will be released for employees on their company app. These policies will directly benefit all of Protium’s 1300+ employees in 52 branches across India.
Speaking on the initiatives, Peeyush Misra, Partner and Director at Protium, said, “The BFSI sector has traditionally been a space that has been disproportionately male-dominated, especially in credit, risk and analytics. With these policies, we aim to make Protium a preferred workplace for women and look forward to double the number of our female employees in 2022.”
The Ticket to Work policy is a dedicated work program that makes new professional opportunities more accessible for female candidates who have already taken a break in their career, either to have children, for health problems or to take care of family.
The Flexi-Hour policy allows female employees to adjust their working hours as per their necessity after their maternity leave ends for a period up to 6 months. This allows employees who are new or expecting mothers to plan their working hours in advance and avoid taking a break from their career should they choose to since getting back to work after a break is notoriously challenging for women.
“Protium’s women-focused policies are an industry benchmark, curated by a team of experts after evaluating the attrition rate of female employees across the industry and the socio-economic constraints that have been a barrier. We hope that, by adopting these policies, we can help women address those constraints while inspiring more organisations to support the participation of women in our ecosystem,” added Peeyush Misra.
Protium is conducting a month-long campaign about celebrating their own female employees along with female entrepreneurs that have been driving change in their industries in recent year. As part of the campaign, Protium announced the adoption of these policies to their employees on Women’s Day and invited Lizzie Chapman, Co-Founder & CEO of ZestMoney to give a talk on how she and her company are leading the BNPL revolution in India.
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